When the Rock Band Network — essentially an App Store for musicians who want to upload and sell Rock Band-playable versions of their songs — opens for business later this year, it has the potential to transform the music industry by giving musicians large and small a distribution platform on one of the few online services that’s managed to successfully monetize music downloads. If, that is, the Network can make their songs easy to find and enjoyable to play. 

The latest addition to the incredibly profitable music video game franchise from MTV/Viacom game studio Harmonix, the Rock Band Network will initially be available for the Microsoft Xbox 360 retail channel, and later for Sony PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii. With more than 50 million purchases and counting, downloadable Rock Band songs are already an important revenue and promotion platform for the music industry. So what will happen when the Rock Band Network greatly expands the download catalog? Two leading figures working at the intersection of music and games are expressing enthusiasm for the Network, but are also sounding some cautionary notes on song deployment.

“Opening Rock Band to uploading by musicians is a key point in making the rise of music games be of benefit to all musicians,” said Nabeel Hyatt, CEO of Conduit Labs (developer of social music game Loud Croud.) Indie star Jonathan Coulton, who has two tracks in Rock Band’s current download library, including his much-loved themed to the cult video game hit Portal, says he plans to expand his offerings on the Network as soon as he can. “[M]y fans are always asking when there will be more,” Coulton told me. “This means I can put as many up there as I want.”

However, that also raises one of the Network’s biggest challenges: As more and more music is uploaded, Rock Band owners may find themselves overwhelmed by choices. “They are going to run into the same discoverability problems that we see in the iPhone App Store and saw in Tower Records,” Hyatt predicted. Coulton concurred. “Hopefully Harmonix will take a cue from all the other successful music discovery platforms and leverage the community itself, ratchet up the social networking aspect of it,” he said.

The challenge for musicians, meanwhile, will be finding indie game developers who can convert their tracks into engaging Rock Band experiences. “I don’t think it will be terribly time-consuming to get something playable,” said Coulton, “but translating good music into good gaming is a new skill, really, one that the Harmonix team has already mastered and the rest of us have never tried.”

Notwithstanding those concerns, “I do think it has the potential to be pretty transformative,” Coulton said. “Anytime you put independent musicians on the same playing field as old school superstars, interesting things start to happen.”

Photo: Coulton performing Rock Band version of Coulton’s “Still Alive” courtesy of Crashworks via Flickr.

With Time Warner Cable poised to take Viacom channels off the air in New York, Los Angeles, Dallas and several other cities Jan. 1 due to a dispute over raising fees, that’s an awful lot of people who will be missing ”The Daily Show,” ”Best Week Ever,” ”Degrassi” and ”The City.” Don’t worry — we can help and have put together a list of places where you can watch these shows and other Viacom programming on NewTeeVee. Update: Time Warner and Viacom have reached an agreement so there will be no disruption of the service.

MySpace Music is launching today and will be accessible only to U.S.-based music fans. Some may call it a competitor to Apple’s music store, but that wouldn’t be entirely true, for Apple’s strength is downloads, while MySpace has made a name by allowing streaming of tunes in the past. There are other differences and even more challenges for this new audacious venture. Just to jog your memory, MySpace Music is a joint venture between MySpace, four major record labels (anti-trust inquiry anyone?) and others.

The music labels own 40 percent of the new venture and are discounting the licensing fees that News Corp., the owner of MySpace and majority owner of MySpace Music, must pay for each song that is streamed. (The New York Times)

It wants to stream music (ad-supported), sell downloads and merchandise. It views itself as worth a couple of billion dollars and still doesn’t have a CEO. Positioning it as an iTunes competitor helps with inflating the mystical valuation. Worried that my own initial skepticism might blind me from getting the facts, I decided to look elsewhere to get a clearer point of view on this experiment.

And knowing that some of our friends in the blog world are going to do a better job of reviewing the actual service than me, I decided to spend some time talking to guys in the music business, especially the small independent labels, to get a sense of what they thought about this new venture. For some odd reason, not many wanted to talk on the record, but still shared some nuggets that lead to the fact and and fiction of MySpace Music.

• MySpace is like an encyclopedia of music, good for discovering and streaming music, and this new venture plays to those strengths. MySpace in the past hasn’t done anything meaningful for digital downloads, and don’t expect that to change. In fact, none of the social networks did anything in terms of sales vs., say, an Apple iTunes store, which does result in actual digital download sales — though not gigantic by any means. Amazon shouldn’t be counting its millions just yet.
• If this works, then that is a good statement for the future of the music business. And if it doesn’t, then it tells where the industry is going. In other words, this is a must-win move for the record labels, who are increasingly looks hapless and, well, unable to deal with change.
• MySpace Music doesn’t fix the problems that plague the industry since the CD died. This is a band-aid to the problem for now. No one has a solution just yet for industry’s problems.
• The advertising revenues from MySpace Music are going to be spread amongst a lot of people, and nobody should count on becoming rich. All that streaming revenues are going to do is pay for recruiting more artists. The sad part is that artists are going to be the last guys to see the money — if any.

This assessment from music industry insiders is in sharp contrast to what Amit Kapur, MySpace’s COO, tells The Wall Street Journal. “”We’re not only going to be their home on the Web…We’re going to be the place they make a living.”

Perhaps Kapur is right, and as one of our readers pointed out, they will be able to generate a lot of revenue through ticket sales and merchandise. But I wonder how many ways that revenue will be sliced and how much will actually end up in an artist’s pocket. What do you guys think?

The latest skirmish in the ongoing Viacom v. YouTube billion-dollar lawsuit battle is over how YouTube employees used their own site. It’s been a nutty couple of weeks for the high-profile case. First a federal judge ordered YouTube to hand over its user data to Viacom. Then Google asked to have user identifying information stripped out. Viacom denied it ever asked for that data (it did) and then said it didn’t want user information after all. Still with us? Now the news is that Viacom wants YouTube employee user information. If the media conglomerate can show that employees were aware of or upoloaded copyrighted material to the site, YouTube could lose its protection under the DMCA. [Full Story on NewTeeVee]

On a day when iPhone app madness has swept the planet (or planet blog at least), there is a bunch of news involving YouTube. First – Viacom today issued a statement about recent court ruling that ordered YouTube to hand over its user data to the media giant. Except they are lying and so wanted the data. In other YouTube news, Liz Gannes reports that YouTube is going to allow geosearching its videos which should help with local search. On the bad news front, looks like they will be able to monetize only 4% of their videos.

There is no love lost between Google and Microsoft. Same holds true for Viacom. So it doesn’t come as a surprise that Microsoft and Viacom have announced a deal that’s essentially You scratch my back and I scratch yours — and with about $500 million worth of scratching. Here is a precis of the news announcement:

What Microsoft Gets:

• Microsoft will get video from Viacom and all related properties like Comedy Central and it will be available on MSN and XBox 360. Microsoft already distributes a lot of content from Viacom.
• Microsoft will get casual games from Viacom.
• Microsoft’s Atlas will be the ad server for Viacom. Viacom will provide unsold display advertising inventory on its digital sites for Microsoft to sell and serve.

What Viacom Gets:

• Money. A lot of it. “Microsoft will buy advertising on Viacom broadcast and online networks over a five-year period and the companies will work together on promotions and sponsorships for MTV Networks and BET Networks award shows.”

Who is the winner?
The five-year-deal is pegged at a base value of $500 million, though the two sides are not talking precise financial terms. I suspect it’s going to favor Viacom.

Viacom doesn’t have to spend anything and at the same time it is getting advertising dollars and more distribution for their content. I get a feeling that, going forward, this is going to become a template deal for all large media companies with content assets. For them it’s a green light to pillage Microsoft’s overflowing coffers.

Deals like this will increase the pressure on Google to do similar ones with other content providers, mostly to thwart Microsoft’s advertising ambitions.

The Writers Guild of America is on strike, holding back new episodes of TV favorites like “The Daily Show” in protest of their lack of a cut of digital revenues. Yesterday, NewTeeVee spoke with Tim Carvell, one of that show’s writers, at a picket line in Manhattan. Being told their online work is “promotional” just doesn’t cut it anymore, he argued:

We understand that it’s a fairly new technology, but that doesn’t seem to prevent them from promising investors specific dollar amounts that they’re going to make off of it. It didn’t prevent them from valuing their Internet content at $1 billion when they sued YouTube.

Continue reading on NewTeeVee.

It is becoming increasingly obvious: Big media companies (content owners) are lining up against YouTube & Google (GOOG), and are coming up with their own strategies for online video. Today, NBC (GE) confirmed to NewTeeVee that it pulled its content off YouTube in a shift towards its own service, a joint venture with News Corp. (NWS) called Hulu.

Last week, after Google launched a new way to identify and prevent copyright infringement, a newly formed coalition said it had come up with its own anti-piracy proposals. There is a clearly fear of Google on the part of large content companies, while at the same time, a desire to build their own online video properties.

It is no surprise that NBC, Viacom (VIA) and others are taking this inward-looking approach. For decades they have married their content to their distribution channels via traditional cable and satellite television. Their approach is merely an extension of that paradigm — though one I don’t necessarily agree with.

It is my belief that these companies are in the business of content, not distribution. Offering their content on their own properties may give them a lift in terms of page views, but at the same time they also run the risk of losing the audience that simply seeks out such content on sites such as YouTube. (I am not even going to touch the fact that this will be yet another place where we will go looking for videos.)

My opinions aside, what do you think? Take our poll, or leave your comments.